A paper entitled “The Complementary-Distribution Challenge for Phonological Learning: The Case of [h] and [ŋ] in English”, coauthored by second-year student Eyal Marco, alum Roni Katzir (PhD 2008), and Ezer Rasin (PhD 2018) has been accepted for publication in Linguistic Inquiry and is available online. Congratulations!
Here is the abstract:
The distribution of [h] and [ŋ] in English poses a well-known challenge for the structuralist assumption that segments in complementary distribution are allophones of the same phoneme. In this paper, we show that this distribution also poses a challenge within generative linguistics, a challenge of explanatory adequacy. The challenge is to explain why the English-learning child does not acquire a grammar in which [h] and [ŋ] are derived from the same underlying representation. The generative literature has not identified this as a problem, largely because of the assumption that [h] and [ŋ] are too phonetically dissimilar to participate in an alternation. However, we argue that phonetic accounts do not eliminate the challenge. We discuss simplicity-based theories of learning and show that under naive representational assumptions, simplicity-based learners prefer to derive [ŋ] from an underlying /h/, rather than a longer sequence of /ng/ (or an underlying /ŋ/), and therefore make wrong predictions about English speakers’ knowledge. The same learners, however, make correct predictions when combined with a representational framework that assumes underspecification and lexical redundancy rules. We therefore conclude that the acquisition problem can be addressed using simplicity-based learning, and that the complementary distribution of [h] and [ŋ] provides an argument for underspecification and lexical redundancy rules.
The paper can be read without a paywall at https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009103
Official site for paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/LING.a.614